A big thank you to Savi's Wine & Cammie Lassiter Lee for hosting our Girls Night Out. Everyone had such a great time! We also want to give a special shout out to Kimberly's Photography for partnering with us for the night as our featured photographer! ​Take a look atour Facebook Pagehere to see our gallery of all of the fun.

We would like to give a special thank you to our wonderful host & vendors!

I am secretly excited that summer is almost over. While many people wait all year for summer and leap into activity, I find myself hibernating like a bear in winter. It's just too hot.

The problem?

1. My Hair

Let’s start with my hair. It doesn’t like humidity. When my hair hears that summer has arrived it automatically puts the frizz out. It doesn’t matter what product I use-it’s going to frizz. It's not a pretty sight.

2. That ball of fire in the sky

The sun that beats down on my flesh burns my ivory skin even from the car to the grocery store. That's what, 15 seconds? As a sunscreen fanatic, I may not burn but I will get prickly red. I am becoming an A/C seeking missile and plan every trip based on the possibility of good air. What else matters?

On cloudy days which, by the way, I consider the perfect beach day…you can find me feeling like Maria in the sound of music singing "the hills are alive with the sound of"…well you get it. I text all my friends and say “the sun isn't out, let’s go to the beach today!” and they think I am insane.

The one perk I get from not being in the sun is very few of those pesky wrinkles and good skin (per my dermatologist). That’s what keeps me going when my friends don’t bother to invite me places because “you won’t want to go anyway”

3. Bloodsuckers and flying pests

Mosquitoes, flying insects and creepy crawlers makes me long for 50 below to hurry and arrive. By the way, I can be in a group of people and be the only person covered in bites at the end of the night. It drives me crazy.

The media tries to make me feel guilty by saying, "it’s so nice out! The weather is perfect!" Those are lies. I don't care about these so called fabulous tales of summer activities that invade my news feed. It won’t work!! I know their tricks.

Okay, rant over.

So to my fellow “I am happy summer is almost over” friends….Who wants to plan a beach trip for the first weekend in October? I hear it's going to be chilly, cloudy and hopefully rainy. Perfect for the beach right?

When I finally learned about how dark chocolate is much healthier than milk chocolate, I had to give it a try.

It tasted so bitter! Almost like they forgot to add the sugar when baking it. But now, I love it! I can't go back.

Let's talk about the reasons why Dark chocolate is better than any other chocolate.

Number 1: Dark chocolate is better for weight loss.

First things first, even though the number of calories in milk chocolate and dark chocolate are similar, dark chocolate contains a fraction of the amount of carbs. Milk chocolate usually has around 50 grams of carbs per 100 g serving, while the amount of carbs in dark chocolate in the same serving size ranges from 8 to 35 carbs, depending on how dark the chocolate is. How dark the chocolate is is determined by the percentage of cocoa it has, the higher the percentage the darker the chocolate. A chocolate with 70% cocoa has ~30 grams; a 85% chocolate has ~20 grams. This means that for those of us on keto or a different low carb diet, we can still get our chocolate fix by choosing dark chocolate with a high cocoa percentage.

Number 2: Dark chocolate is more filling.

One of the biggest problems with any snack is that we tend to eat the entire thing at once because we just don't feel full. The cool thing about dark chocolate compared to milk chocolate is that it takes much less to satisfy chocolate cravings with the dark chocolate.

The dark chocolate has more nutrients and less sugar. This means your body gets more of what it needs and less of what it doesn't (sugar).

Since dark chocolate is higher in cocoa powder, it's also higher in many nutrients, such as iron, magnesium, phosphorus, copper and manganese. Combined with the lower amount of sugar and high amount of fat, it's no surprise you get your daily chocolate fix quicker with dark chocolate than milk chocolate.

So remember:

You can still have your sweets, just choose the better ones.

Stick with the dark chocolate! It might be tough at first, but after you get used to it, you won't want to go back. Just like diet soda in my case.

Welcome!

Hi 👋 My name is Laurie and I am a Social Media Marketing Manager based in New Bern, NC. I am married to the man of my dreams, a mom and in love with my adorable grandson, Noah. I love checking out new local restaurants, festivals and events while searching for great places to host monthly Girls Night Out. You can usually find me checking out all things live music, the best hospitality in town and working on my campaign to bring Bonefish Grill to New Bern-it's going to happen!!​